The hotel is in a great location, although quite far at 12 km from the city center. The bus 615 can take you from the front of the hotel all the way to the Paphos harbour. You can choose to go to the city center from the harbour by taking the bus 610. I recommend you take the bus because it’s pretty far and it’s mostly uphill. The hotel facade and outside area looks lovely from a distance. If you take a closer look, that’s a whole different story but I’ll get to that part shortly. The small super market in the hotel is great and the prices are acceptable. There’s a bigger super market just across the street.
These were the good parts and the bad parts are much longer…
But let’s take it from the beginning. We arrived to the hotel at 2 in the morning and did the check in at the reception. The gentleman wasn’t really friendly, we disturb his grace from his midnight snack (he was still chewing his food while checking us in), and he quickly sent us with almost no instructions on our way alone to carry our own luggage and find our room by ourselves. Concierge is supposed to be working 24/7 but apparently not that night.
Nevertheless, after trying the wrong floors and going in the wrong direction several times, we finally arrived to our Studio room where we were supposed to spend the next amazing 8 days. Or so we thought.
Our first impression was already a bad one. The hotel corridor looked old, dirty and it was stinking. I didn’t pay so much attention though because the pictures of the room on the website looked very promising: modern, new and clean. Well, we couldn’t be more wrong. The room was also stinking and it looked like it hasn’t been renovated since before I was born!
We were exhausted so we decided to air the room and then turn the aircon on (it was incredibly hot) and go to bed. Plan failed! There was an annoyingly loud sound which seemed to come from the aircon. So we switched the aircon off willing to suffer the big heat but the sound was still present. We searched around the room but we heard it at the entrance and in the bathroom too. Eventually we went into the corridor and noticed that the culprit was the aircon right in front of our room.
I’m unfortunately very sensitive to sounds during the night when I try to sleep. You can imagine how much this disturbed me. I always take my earplugs with me but they didn’t help much either. Yes, it was that loud! Eventually my boyfriend went down to the reception to complain and he was told that we will get another room on the next day. This meant that we won’t get any sleep that night and it was already 3 in the morning and we traveled a long way and we were up for 20 hours. Luckily one of the employees came to see the problem and probably reported how bad it is because after half an hour the receptionist called and told us that they have another room and we should come there. Of course this meant packing everything back, carrying our luggage again and finding the room again. At 4 o’clock in the morning. By the time we got there, the receptionist was even more unfriendly and very unpatient.
Our new room was a garden studio, slightly better looking (although the tub was dirty and the dirt couldn’t be washed down!!! Also the closet door fell in my boyfriend’s hand on the next day.) and with a small terrasse area with sunbeds. This was clearly an upgrade, which the receptionist pointed out several times. We were only happy to crash and get some sleep finally.
Our garden studio was actually one of the smallest ones because it was a family studio and it was connected to another room. The hotel staff swore that the connecting door is locked but one night the neighbors from that room came into ours and almost gave us a heart attack. The hotel staff showed no trust whatsoever. The receptionist and the handyman didn’t believe us and we had to examine the doors and the locks ourselves and prove it to them. This happened 2 nights before leaving and we barely got some sleep on those nights thinking that someone will come in again.
Free internet? Not in our room! The wifi signal was so bad that we could only catch one line at the entrance door to our room. We complained several times and they promised to send the IT Manager to fix the issue, the wifi hasn’t improved during our stay though.
The next days brought more excitement. We had problems at the restaurant most of the time. The tables weren’t cleared for long periods of time although the staff was just walking around lazily doing nothing. Even if we could get a table, it wasn’t fully set up, missing fork, dessert spoon or knife. After waiting for a long time for someone to come so I can ask for a knife unsuccessfully, I went to them myself and the employee gave me a used one from the cutlery which he just gathered from another table. Another morning at breakfast my boyfriend found a used napkin nicely folded back, luckily he noticed it before using it.
On a side note, the food was pretty ok, dinner was theme-based and, even though they only managed the Cyprus-themed dinner well, I appreciate that they tried to offer a great variety so the guests don’t get bored with the same food over and over again, which happened at breakfast. Another plus point was the omelets and various other egg dishes at breakfast prepared fresh by the cooks in front of the guests on request. The cooks were very friendly, talking to the guests and asking them how their day was.
The sea was dirty. Every day. It wasn’t cleaned and it was full of yucky green stuff. I could only go into the sea on an airbed so I don’t touch those things.
We discovered the blue-flagged coral beach on the last days which was right next to this hotel. Crystal clear blue water, no dirt, no green stuff, so it was possible but only not at this hotel.
Although the hotel area looks big enough, we had trouble finding sunbeds every day. There aren’t enough umbrellas either, most of the guests take the umbrellas from the other sunbeds to have two because the sun gets really strong at noon but when we arrived, there were, if we were lucky, only a couple of free sunbeds but no umbrella. I had to eventually complain to the staff every time and they sent someone on an umbrella hunt for us. The guests reserved sunbeds, although it’s forbidden and there’s also a sign where this is written. I’ve seen this every day and a lot of the sunbeds right at the pool were not used for the entire day, although a towel was put on it.
The pool area and the pool itself looked pretty and seemed clean, although I found long hairs curled around my hands and fingers in the pool several times. Yuck!
One day the hotel even cleared the entire pool area and moved all the sunbeds to a small green area because of a wedding which was taking place in the evening. The sunbed area looked like a can of sardines!
There was a wedding every evening, on 3 evenings there were even two at the same time. One was at the pool, which is why the pool area was cleared for the entire day and the hotel guests were crowded like sardines on a small green area overlooking the harbour. We were lucky that our room was far enough so we couldn’t hear the noise and the music but I feel sorry for the guests who had to endure it every evening. Weddings seem to be the first priority and the hotel guests are clearly second class citizens.
On a side note the guests clearly need some education too. They were also very loud and were shouting in the lobby, in the restaurant, at the pool, everywhere! Sometimes even during the night on the lawn right in front of our room.
The staff at the bar tricked us already on the first day! We asked for two coke zeros and we got two small glasses overloaded with ice and barely some coke. As we told him our room number, he realised that we’re not on the all-inclusive package, which it turns out the drinks in the small glasses are served for. Nevertheless he charged us for two full 1/2 liter bottles of coke, 5 euros for two sips of coke. We haven’t bought any drinks at the bar after that.
What about the entertainment? The hotel has a couple of girls organizing sports activities, like table tennis or tennis, but it’s at midday when the heat is the worst. Playing tennis at noon when it’s 40 degrees Celsius in the shades? No thank you. Plus I’ve seen one of them playing table tennis and she could barely hit the ball.
At check-out we asked the receptionist to send the person who was coming to pick us up to us, we showed the receptionist where we were waiting. Needless to say that he didn’t, we eventually noticed a guy walking around searching for someone and went to ask him if he was looking for us.
I’m not the type to complain. Not usually. But at this place I just couldn’t help it. We had so many problems that I barely scratched the surface in this blog post. Eventually I ran out of patience and I got sick and tired to forgive & forget. Unfortunately complaints didn’t help much at this hotel. Most of the times we had to complain 3 times about an issue and there were several problems which weren’t resolved at all.
I would like to mention that the manager approached us after yet another heated argument with the receptionist and called us for a private discussion but I honestly didn’t have the nerves for it. My boyfriend talked several times with him about our bad experience. He apologized, sent us a bottle of champagne with canapés and added us to the business guests list, whatever that is.
On our last evening he also offered us a beautiful Junior Suite for a week with half-board any time we want. Needless to say that we declined this generous offer. It was simply too late! I felt tricked by this hotel. Our room looked nothing like the pictures on the website, where they show this amazing place and when I go there, it looks like a total dump. The staff in general is quite unfriendly and the restaurant staff in particular is completely untrained and unmotivated. I have been promised 8 days in a dreamy relaxing 5* star hotel and what I got was 8 days of stress and anger. Never again! Not even for free!
I have read several bad reviews about this place on trip advisor but there were positive ones too so I was optimistic that it’ll be a nice vacation. Well, from now on I’ll be more careful! This is no way a 5* hotel, a 3* at most, if I’m generous enough.
If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it and I would like to thank you. You can also look at the pictures of the hotel here and the pictures of Cyprus can be found here.
FitGeekGirl 